Operational Replanning with User Defined Operational Picture: Warfighting Experiment and Operational Assessment Plan

In adapting C2 to the 21st century we plan to conduct a controlled Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) experiment with new Network Centric Warfare (NCW) technology which will be introduced to sixteen experienced warfighters in the form of a collaborative User Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) with Blue Force Readiness and intelligence database access enabled by an IP wide area network as a possible improvement over their use of current baseline technology in the form of the GCCS with Common Operational Picture (COP) capability. We examine here the general methodology of using controlled HITL experiments employing combat scenarios as an Operational Assessment for testing and evolving more effective C2 technology for the warfighter. (See the Award-winning TTCP GUIDEx, 2006.) Our general theoretical hypothesis views the warfighting team as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS), and asserts that a team's use of shared informational schema contributes to their shared mental models resulting in increased combat effectiveness in the battlespace.(See Gell-Mann, 1994,1997.) In particular, we hypothesize that the results of this experiment will show significant improvements on the NCW performance metrics of Situational Awareness, Shared Situational Awareness and bottom-line Combat Effectiveness due to use of the new NECC (Net-Enabled Command Capability) technology employed in the experiment trials. The especially important role of enhanced operational replanning quality, and speed, enabled by the new technology, will be carefully examined here, since recent experimentation results suggest them as NCW metrics that warrant more scrutiny by the research community. (See Hiniker and Entin, 2006.) Thus, we expect that collaboration and synchronized replanning will play important roles impacting combat effectiveness in this C2 experiment.